Rating: 3/5 – Solid horror story that would read better as a single issue than as 4 shorter installments.by ComicSpectrum EiC Bob Bretall.

Asusto is a horror story inspired by characters from classic Costa Rican and Latin American folktales. Creative Impulse Entertainment is making this available in four 99-cent installments that will essentially make up a single “regular comic priced” story. Also of note is the fact that it’s available in both English and Spanish, you can find it on Comixology here: https://www.comixology.com/search?search=asusto

Written and illustrated by Franco Cespedes, I found this to be an intriguing story, but the pacing (in the 99 cent installments) was really throwing me. There is some necessary pacing to set things up, build suspense, and tell this story they way it needs to be told (I’m figuring it to have a Twilight Zone-ish twist/reveal coming up) and that was not working for me chopped up into the smaller installments. I’d have preferred to just read the entire story in one go. As it stands, there’s just not a satisfying stand-alone chunk of story in the 1st installment. I felt there was a similar pacing problem in the 2nd installment where we get teased with some of the monster/horror elements, but not to a sufficient degree to carry the whole episode for me.

Cespedes has a clean art style with an animation feel to it, but in my opinion he over-used the digital blur effect on action scenes, it was distracting and made me enjoy the art just a bit less than I would have otherwise. On the writing side, it’s a challenge, but storytelling should be synchronized with the delivery method and I think the pacing needed to be altered to make this more consumable as a serialized story. Overall, this was a solid read but I feel like it would read better as a single story than chopped up into four pieces, though I can understand the business decision behind making this deliverable in 99-cent story chunks.